Britain's GCHQ looks at creating nationwide internet firewall

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's GCHQ security agency is considering developing a nationwide internet firewall to block malicious content and protect government networks from rocketing numbers of attacks, the incoming head of its new cyber security arm says.

Ciaran Martin, the chief executive of the eavesdropping agency's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said the measure was among a number of more ambitious, active approaches Britain was taking in the face of an upsurge in attacks.

"Far too many of these basic attacks are getting through. And they are doing far too much damage," Martin said in a speech at a summit in Washington.

The NCSC's brief will be to better coordinate Britain's cyber defenses, and Martin said the proposed "flagship" project of extending government defenses to private internet providers would scale up DNS (domain name system) filtering, a means of screening out malicious websites.

"What better way of providing automated defences at scale than by the major private providers effectively blocking their customers from coming into contact with known malware and bad addresses," he said.

Last year, Martin said some 200 national security level cyber incidents were detected every month, double the number from the previous year while 65 percent of all large UK companies had reported a breach.

However, he said most attacks were unsophisticated, highlighting the high-profile hacking of Britain's TalkTalk Telecom Group which he said had used a technique from the end of the last century.

He said the NCSC was looking to use new automated systems to better protect government networks, such as stopping scammers using spoof email addresses that appeared to be from official departments. This had stopped one such scammer sending 58,000 malicious emails a day from the fake taxrefund.go.uk address.